Robert W. Duffy

Robert W. Duffy

Cyndy Maasen

Robert W. Duffy reported on arts and culture for St. Louis Public Radio. He had a 32-year career at the Post-Dispatch, then helped to found the St. Louis Beacon, which merged in January with St. Louis Public Radio. He has written about the visual arts, music, architecture and urban design throughout his career.

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Forty years ago this week the lights went down on the Loretto-Hilton Theatre in Webster Groves. A special brand of illumination radiated that first night, shining optimism, hope and artistic authority on a new opera scene. It rose like a fiery dawn in late Midwestern springtime.

This week, that light continues to shine on Opera Theatre of St. Louis, which opens its new season Saturday with Giacomo Puccini’s “La bohème.”

A late autumn's promise has bloomed in the spring: a once-hidden architectural gem in St. Louis is open to the public at last.

U-Haul International Inc. has made good on its commitment to uncover and repair a sculptured ceiling created for the main lobby of its mid-20th century facility on South Kingshighway by the late American artist and designer Isamu Noguchi.

If your job were to nourish and to advance a venerable cultural institution so skillfully that its dignity and integrity would be burnished while, at the same time, you send it riding high into the cultural and civic mainstream by selling it to an over-stimulated, word and image weary public, what would you do, what should you do?

When the industrialist Firmin Desloge died in 1929 at 86 years of age, his various enterprises, including Missouri lead mining, made him as rich as tycoons such as William K. Vanderbilt and Andrew Mellon. In obituaries he was described as one of the wealthiest men in America, and his status was buoyed as well by his membership in the select group of the French-American aristocracy. A portrait photograph shows him sporting a great bushy mustache, along with unruly curly hair and a very content and happy face.

In the art exhibitions business, when you find yourself faced with the conflicting character attributes of a millionaire who built his fortune on patent medicines of questionable quality yet who carried with him works of art of extraordinary aesthetic and historical value, you can be reasonably certain of having a hit on your hands.

St. Mary's -- once a valuable component of the health-care structure of St. Louis and an institution of special importance to the community's African-American population -- has a month left, but after that month has passed, it’s marked for demolition. Even now it is considered an “an imminent threat to public safety."

For two decades at least, exotic swirls of extraordinary biomorphic beauty hung in obscurity above the heads of the temporary truckers, the moving box buyers and the storage facility renters who came to do business at the U-Haul store on South Kingshighway and Northrup Avenue, just north of I-44.

Modern art, architecture and decorative arts created in the middle of the 20th century were swamped by the reactionary ruckus of the late 20th century post-modernist movement.

Given the quality and originality of so much of the mid-century’s aesthetic industry, its relegation to obscurity was a big mistake and a now recognized lapse of taste. However, all wasn’t lost. A new exhibition opening this weekend at the St. Louis Art Museum joins other scholarship and exhibitions dedicated to setting the record straight.

In response to a story about the markers project published two weeks ago, we’ve had thoughtful responses to the entrances-to-the-park issue. Some harkened back to Lawrence Halprin’s proposal for elaborate gates that was hooted down and abandoned in 2001; others expressed ideas about the current plan, created by SWT Design, St. Louis.

Evelyn Newman – a pillar of the community if ever there was one -- died Tuesday at Barnes-Jewish Hospital after a brief illness. She was 95 years old.

Although born in Georgia Mrs. Newman considered herself a lifelong St. Louisan. With her loyalty to this region, she brought business acuity and a special talent for marketing to bear on worthy regional causes.

Ernst K. Zinner, an astrophysicist who spent a distinguished and game-changing career at Washington University -- who, in fact, discovered fossils older than the solar system -- died Thursday, July 30, of complications of mantle cell lymphoma. He was 78 and lived in University City.

Mr. Zinner's interests, his career, the objects of his research, along with his stunning accomplishments, were infinite, as deep and profound as space, aspects of which he knew so well. Although personally modest, his dedication to science was renowned. Colleagues held him in esteem as a brilliant scientist and a nurturing mentor, and as a warm and generous friend.

In the sunny room in which Ellen Eisendrath Post spent her last days, the room in which she died at 79 years of age on Friday, she was surrounded not only by the warmth and stimulation of people she loved but by an abundance of objects, new and old, and flowers and books — things that mattered to her and things she loved as well.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s 19th opera – the one sandwiched between “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Cosi fan tutte,” is described regularly and superlatively with the word “perfection.” This opera is “Don Giovanni,” presented over the weekend by Union Avenue Opera in a production conducted by Scott Schoonover and directed by Jon Truitt. Two more performances are to come, on Friday and Saturday, June 17 and 18, at 8 p.m..

Often the steady, sturdy and stalwart are described as bricks, those men and women who rise to the occasion when there’s a difficulty of one sort or another. Bricks are smart, determined, rigorous, tireless, scrupulous, thorough, imaginative, honest, and they don’t shy away from conflict. They are courageous. Esley Hamilton, as much as anyone I know, is a brick. Because his business has been historic preservation, standing up for threatened structures often made out of bricks, he is aptly described by that moniker.

“Senufo Unbound: Dynamics of Art and Identity in West Africa,” an exhibit of extraordinary interest that opened recently at the St. Louis Art Museum, is the rare bird that flies between two branches with grace and a keen sense of intelligent direction.

The timing might have been better, Walter L. Metcalfe Jr. said Wednesday.

His plan was to remain as chairman of the CityArchRiver Foundation through Oct. 28, 2015, the golden jubilee of the topping off of the Gateway Arch, which is the central feature of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, the signature of St. Louis.

Oct. 28 was his marker, Metcalfe said, his exit cue. He said he had no desire to stay on for the next phase of the project, the organization of a conservancy for the Arch-centered project.

The muntined window that looks into the suffocating world of Emmeline Mosher is opaque with filth, and a broken pane offers the only possibility of viewing this world. Not that anyone would want to, unless he or she were interested in discovering in the person of Emmeline Mosher the pain and sadness of the human condition we all experience to greater and lesser degrees.

Anyone who’s been a regular visitor to Opera Theatre of St. Louis in its 40-season history knows there’ve been no shortages of memorable productions on its stage. George Frideric Handel’s “Richard the Lionheart,” given its American premiere here his year, will be the crowning achievement of this special-anniversary season, and will lodge itself as a touchstone in history and memory, as are Jonathan Miller’s “Cosi fan tutte” (1982) and Colin Graham’s “Beatrice and Benedict” (1983) and other operas one might choose.

For just shy of 30 years, when Yo-Yo the Narrator stepped balletically into the center of the ring of our city’s own Circus Flora, she was shod in court shoes with a medium heel, rather fancy in the footwear world, shoes in keeping with her studied gestures and attitudes.

On opening night at the circus on Friday, her shoes were quite different, low to the ground, decidedly sensible, nondescript. And intended or not, these new shoes are signifiers.

In 1929, Luther Ely Smith, whom the National Park Service calls “the father of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial,” convened a group of civic worthies for lunch at the old Noonday Club downtown. Later on, a fellow named Leo Drey joined the group. Mr. Drey, who died Wednesday at the age of 98, would become a stalwart member of the group, and one of its most dynamic leaders.

“Aida” is one of a group of extraordinary 19th century works of musical drama that gave opera its sometime first name, that is, “Grand.” In an all-stops-pulled-out production of “Aida,” soldiers lead chain gangs of slaves and supernumeraries wave huge feather fans, with nubile ballerinas dancing their own special ballet, plus the company of acres of choristers, plus elephants sometimes and a cast of principals with voices grand as all outdoors.

Such an “Aida” etches indelible memories on an audience member, leaving him or her either breathless with devotion or convinced that all this actually is excessive and silly.

On Wednesday, Christine Brewer was properly awarded a star on St. Louis' Walk of Fame in the Delmar Loop. To think about her journey there, it is useful to go back 34 years, when Opera Theatre of St. Louis had become the regional American opera company to watch. And that dates to 1976, when Richard Gaddes, a fearless young British impresario, was brought to town to establish the company.

When I talked to Elaine Gregory McCluskey recently at her office at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., and explained I was working on a story about engineering experiments at the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in the 1970s, she was bewildered. Why, why was I writing about Pruitt Igoe almost four decades after the place had been obliterated?

Joseph Pulitzer IV, the last of a line of Joseph Pulitzers stretching back to the 19th century to hold positions at the family’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, died Thursday in Berkeley, Calif., following a massive heart attack. He was 65 and lived in Sheridan, Wyo.